I recently had the privilege of attending Zendcon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA I ended up doing four talks (two regular, one panel, and one Unconference talk) in addition to working a few hours a day. It was a lot of fun, as conferences always are, and it was great to meet my friends that I only see a couple times a year. I even met a few new "online only" friends like Lorna Jane Mitchell (PHPWomen rock the house and her coverage of the conference was great). But I'm exhausted... and since I went straight from almost eight hours of travel into the "catch up with mommy work" (that means doctor appointments, laundry, cleaning...) I've had no down time at all, however my slides are available.

My favorite talk of the conference, the one I enjoyed the most, was actually the unconference talk. I did ended up doing a little song and dance about PHP-GTK, a project I work on that allows PHP to be used for desktop apps. I actually wrote a twitter client app purely as a tutorial for the session. The little client ended up working so well I'm making it available via SVN as part of my Callicore stuff. For now it's not built on the framework since I'm waiting for PHP 5.3 to get released, but I intend to move it over at some point to allow it to harness the configuration and plugin support from the Callicore base.

You can view the slides for my uncon talk, or view the source code. It's now at the callicore Trac and svn and needs some attention, most notably some work to make it behave properly on mobile devices, better handling for the gtkstatusicon trick (right now it's just dying if the device doesn't have an icon) and saving of the username/password for twitter. Feel free to file some bugs or lend a hand.

My first "real" talk, and the one I was most nervous going into, was my PECL picks talk, an overview of all the cool stuff available in PECL. Even with 70 some slides I was nervous and rushed, so I ran short. Ah well. At least I got to highlight all the cool stuff available. Hopefully I can work on that talk again for another conference with more cool stuff.

My second "real" talk was much easier for me, first I was in a smaller room (although it was packed), I was less nervous after doing my first official conference talk, and I had candy to throw at people. That talk was actually something that grew out of a rant of my - "Runs on PHP5" is not "Written for PHP5". I get really really really really (see the theme?) irritated when people don't use what's available and instead "reinvent the wheel" - particularly stupid when C is a lot faster than PHP ;)

And candy is always good.

Then I was on the 5.3 features panel, simply because I was the only member of the Window PHP Build Team that was still at the conference (Visit our new site or read the wiki to learn more)

Anyway, I had a good time and intend to be back next year if at all possible.